[windexh8er]

> They are helping their users create things that didn't exist before.

That is a derived output. That isn't new as in: novel. It may be unique but it is derived from training data. LLMs legitimately cannot think and thus they cannot create in that way.

[ordersofmag]

I will find this often-repeated argument compelling only when someone can prove to me that the human mind works in a way that isn't 'combining stuff it learned in the past'.

5 years ago a typical argument against AGI was that computers would never be able to think because "real thinking" involved mastery of language which was something clearly beyond what computers would ever be able to do. The implication was that there was some magic sauce that human brains had that couldn't be replicated in silicon (by us). That 'facility with language' argument has clearly fallen apart over the last 3 years and been replaced with what appears to be a different magic sauce comprised of the phrases 'not really thinking' and the whole 'just repeating what it's heard/parrot' argument.

I don't think LLM's think or will reach AGI through scaling and I'm skeptical we're particularly close to AGI in any form. But I feel like it's a matter of incremental steps. There isn't some magic chasm that needs to be crossed. When we get there I think we will look back and see that 'legitimately thinking' wasn't anything magic. We'll look at AGI and instead of saying "isn't it amazing computers can do this" we'll say "wow, was that all there is to thinking like a human".

[windexh8er]

> 5 years ago a typical argument against AGI was that computers would never be able to think because "real thinking" involved mastery of language which was something clearly beyond what computers would ever be able to do.

Mastery of words is thinking? In that line of argument then computers have been able to think for decades.

Humans don't think only in words. Our context, memory and thoughts are processed and occur in ways we don't understand, still.

There's a lot of great information out there describing this [0][1]. Continuing to believe these tools are thinking, however, is dangerous. I'd gather it has something to do with logic: you can't see the process and it's non-deterministic so it feels like thinking. ELIZA tricked people. LLMs are no different.

[0] https://archive.is/FM4y8 [0] https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/827820/l... [1] https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/secondary-school-maths-show...

[CamperBob2]

Mastery of words is thinking?

That's the crazy thing. Yes, in fact, it turns out that language encodes and embodies reasoning. All you have to do is pile up enough of it in a high-dimensional space, use gradient descent to model its original structure, and add some feedback in the form of RL. At that point, reasoning is just a database problem, which we currently attack with attention.

No one had the faintest clue. Even now, many people not only don't understand what just happened, but they don't think anything happened at all.

ELIZA, ROFL. How'd ELIZA do at the IMO last year?

[svieira]

> Yes, in fact, it turns out that language encodes and embodies reasoning ... No one had the faintest clue

Funnily enough, they did, if you go back far enough. It's only the deconstructionists and the solipsists who had the audacity to think otherwise.

[meindnoch]

So people without language cannot reason? I don't think so.

[CamperBob2]

There's no such thing as people without language, except for infants and those who are so mentally incapacitated that the answer is self-evidently "No, they cannot."

Language is the substrate of reason. It doesn't need to be spoken or written, but it's a necessary and (as it turns out) sufficient component of thought.

[windexh8er]

There are quite a few studies to refute this highly ignorant comment. I'd suggest some reading [0].

From the abstract: "Is thought possible without language? Individuals with global aphasia, who have almost no ability to understand or produce language, provide a powerful opportunity to find out. Astonishingly, despite their near-total loss of language, these individuals are nonetheless able to add and subtract, solve logic problems, think about another person’s thoughts, appreciate music, and successfully navigate their environments. Further, neuroimaging studies show that healthy adults strongly engage the brain’s language areas when they understand a sentence, but not when they perform other nonlinguistic tasks like arithmetic, storing information in working memory, inhibiting prepotent responses, or listening to music. Taken together, these two complementary lines of evidence provide a clear answer to the classic question: many aspects of thought engage distinct brain regions from, and do not depend on, language."

[0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4874898/

[windexh8er]

> ELIZA, ROFL. How'd ELIZA do at the IMO last year?

What's funny is the failure to grasp any contextual framing of ELIZA. When it came out people were impressed by it's reasoning, it's responses. And in your line of defense it could think because it had mastery of words!

But fast forward the current timeline 30 years. You will have been of the same camp that argued on behalf of ELIZA when the rest of the world was asking, confusingly: how did people think ChatGPT could think?

[CamperBob2]

No one was impressed with ELIZA's "reasoning" except for a few non-specialist test subjects recruited from the general population. Admittedly it was disturbing to see how strongly some of those people latched onto it.

Meanwhile, you didn't answer my question. How'd ELIZA do on the IMO? If you know a way to achieve gold-medal performance at top-level math and programming competitions without thinking, I for one am all ears.

[svieira]

Does a prolog program think?

[arcatech]

> I will find this often-repeated argument compelling only when someone can prove to me that the human mind works in a way that isn't 'combining stuff it learned in the past'.

This is the definition of the word ‘novel’.

[Kerrick]

That is a pedantic distinction. You can create something that didn't exist by combining two things that did exist, in a way of combining things that already existed. For example, you could use a blender to combine almond butter and sawdust. While this may not be "novel", and it may be derived from existing materials and methods, you may still lay claim to having created something that didn't exist before.

For a more practical example, creating bindings from dynamic-language-A for a library in compiled-language-B is a genuinely useful task, allowing you to create things that didn't exist before. Those things are likely to unlock great happiness and/or productivity, even if they are derived from training data.

[windexh8er]

> That is a pedantic distinction. You can create something that didn't exist by combining two things that did exist, in a way of combining things that already existed.

This is the definition of a derived product. Call it a derivative work if we're being pedantic and, regardless, is not any level of proof that LLMs "think".

[threethirtytwo]

Pedantic and not true. The LLM has stochastic processes involved. Randomness. That’s not old information. That’s newly generated stuff.

[jama211]

Yeah you’ve lost me here I’m sorry. In the real world humans work with AI tools to create new things. What you’re saying is the equivalent of “when a human writes a book in English, because they use words and letters that already exist and they already know they aren’t creating anything new”.

[nl]

What does "think" mean?

Why is that kind of thinking required to create novel works?

Randomness can create novelty.

Mistakes can be novel.

There are many ways to create novelty.

Also I think you might not know how LLMs are trained to code. Pre-training gives them some idea of the syntax etc but that only gets you to fancy autocomplete.

Modern LLMs are heavily trained using reinforcement data which is custom task the labs pay people to do (or by distilling another LLM which has had the process performed on it).

[closewith]

By that definition, nearly all commercial software development (and nearly all human output in general) is derived output.

[windexh8er]

Wow.

You’re using ‘derived’ to imply ‘therefore equivalent.’ That’s a category error. A cookbook is derived from food culture. Does an LLM taste food? Can it think about how good that cookie tastes?

A flight simulator is derived from aerodynamics - yet it doesn’t fly.

Likewise, text that resembles reasoning isn’t the same thing as a system that has beliefs, intentions, or understanding. Humans do. LLMs don't.

Also... Ask an LLM what's the difference between a human brain and an LLM. If an LLM could "think" it wouldn't give you the answer it just did.

[CamperBob2]

Ask an LLM what's the difference between a human brain and an LLM. If an LLM could "think" it wouldn't give you the answer it just did.

I imagine that sounded more profound when you wrote it than it did just now, when I read it. Can you be a little more specific, with regard to what features you would expect to differ between LLM and human responses to such a question?

Right now, LLM system prompts are strongly geared towards not claiming that they are humans or simulations of humans. If your point is that a hypothetical "thinking" LLM would claim to be a human, that could certainly be arranged with an appropriate system prompt. You wouldn't know whether you were talking to an LLM or a human -- just as you don't now -- but nothing would be proved either way. That's ultimately why the Turing test is a poor metric.

[windexh8er]

> Right now, LLM system prompts are strongly geared towards not claiming that they are humans or simulations of humans. If your point is that a hypothetical "thinking" LLM would claim to be a human, that could certainly be arranged with an appropriate system prompt. You wouldn't know whether you were talking to an LLM or a human -- just as you don't now -- but nothing would be proved either way. That's ultimately why the Turing test is a poor metric.

The mental gymnastics here is entertainment at best. Of course the thinking LLM would give feedback on how it's actually just a pattern model over text - well, we shouldn't believe that! The LLM was trained to lie about it's true capabilities in your own admission?

How about these...

What observable capability would you expect from "true cognitive thought" that a next-token predictor couldn’t fake?

Where are the system’s goals coming from—does it originate them, or only reflect the user/prompt?

How does it know when it’s wrong without an external verifier? If the training data says X and the answer is Y - how will it ever know it was wrong and reach the correct conclusion?

[CamperBob2]

How does it know when it’s wrong without an external verifier? If the training data says X and the answer is Y - how will it ever know it was wrong and reach the correct conclusion?

You need to read a few papers with publication dates after 2023.

[closewith]

You’re arguing against a straw man. No one is claiming LLMs have beliefs, intentions, or understanding. They don’t need them to be economically useful.

[windexh8er]

Oh yes, they are.

And beyond people claiming that LLMs are basically sentient you have people like CamperBob2 who made this wild claim:

"""There's no such thing as people without language, except for infants and those who are so mentally incapacitated that the answer is self-evidently "No, they cannot."

Language is the substrate of reason. It doesn't need to be spoken or written, but it's a necessary and (as it turns out) sufficient component of thought."""

Let that sink. They literally think that there's no such thing as people without language. Talk about a wild and ignorant take on life in general!

[CamperBob2]

How'd they communicate with the test subjects?

That's "language."

[zingar]

Could you give us an idea of what you’re hoping for that is not possible to derive from training data of the entire internet and many (most?) published books?

[techpression]

This is the problem, the entire internet is a really bad set of training data because it’s extremely polluted.

Also the derived argument doesn’t really hold, just because you know about two things doesn’t mean you’d be able to come up with the third, it’s actually very hard most of the time and requires you to not do next token prediction.

[threethirtytwo]

The emergent phenomenon is that the LLM can separate truth from fiction when you give it a massive amount of data. It can figure the world out just as we can figure it out when we are as well inundated with bullshit data. The pathways exist in the LLM but it won’t necessarily reveal that to you unless you tune it with RL.

[ahtihn]

> The emergent phenomenon is that the LLM can separate truth from fiction when you give it a massive amount of data.

I don't believe they can. LLMs have no concept of truth.

What's likely is that the "truth" for many subjects is represented way more than fiction and when there is objective truth it's consistently represented in similar way. On the other hand there are many variations of "fiction" for the same subject.

[threethirtytwo]

They can and we have definitive proof. When we tune LLM models with reinforcement learning the models end up hallucinating less and becoming more reliable. Basically in a nut shell we reward the model when telling the truth and punish it when it’s not.

So think of it like this, to create the model we use terabytes of data. Then we do RL which is probably less than one percent of additional data involved in the initial training.

The change in the model is that reliability is increased and hallucinations are reduced at a far greater rate than one percent. So much so that modern models can be used for agentic tasks.

How can less than one percent of reinforcement training get the model to tell the truth greater than one percent of the time?

The answer is obvious. It ALREADY knew the truth. There’s no other logical way to explain this. The LLM in its original state just predicts text but it doesn’t care about truth or the kind of answer you want. With a little bit of reinforcement it suddenly does much better.

It’s not a perfect process and reinforcement learning often causes the model to be deceptive an not necessarily tell the truth but it more gives an answer that may seem like the truth or an answer that the trainer wants to hear. In general though we can measurably see a difference in truthfulness and reliability to an extent far greater than the data involved in training and that is logical proof it knows the difference.

Additionally while I say it knows the truth already this is likely more of a blurry line. Even humans don’t fully know the truth so my claim here is that an LLM knows the truth to a certain extent. It can be wildly off for certain things but in general it knows and this “knowing” has to be coaxed out of the model through RL.

Keep in mind the LLM is just auto trained on reams and reams of data. That training is massive. Reinforcement training is done on a human basis. A human must rate the answers so it is significantly less.

[habinero]

> The answer is obvious. It ALREADY knew the truth. There’s no other logical way to explain this.

I can think of several offhand.

1. The effect was never real, you've just convinced yourself it is because you want it to be, ie you Clever Hans'd yourself.

2. The effect is an artifact of how you measure "truth" and disappears outside that context ("It can be wildly off for certain things")

3. The effect was completely fabricated and is the result of fraud.

If you want to convince me that "I threatened a statistical model with a stick and it somehow got more accurate, therefore it's both intelligent and lying" is true, I need a lot less breathless overcredulity and a lot more "I have actively tried to disprove this result, here's what I found"